Trends

Last year the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels was signed to introduce Audi to the world of urbanism and architecture. Audi, that launched the Audi Urban Future program, needed a key figure in the world of architecture to help the brand explore this discipline. Audi is not the only company. The car brand competes with loads of other…

The next hotel is modular. In 2012 people want to sleep in the middle of the woods, float in the sea or relax in a snowy landscape. Good ol’ hotels that consist of one solid piece of concrete with rooms in it connected by a central hall just don’t do it any more. Over the…

Apple launched its intelligent software assistant Siri in August last year. Resulting from decades of research at SRI International’s Artificial Intelligence Center, Siri uses a natural language user interface to answer questions, make recommendations and perform actions by delegating requests to a set of web services. The service is even able to adapt to a user’s individual…

Increasing numbers of designers and artists seem to be concerned with animals. Over the last years we’ve encountered loads of projects that extend design principles to the world of animals. Sometimes to improve living conditions for animals or help to preserve a species, sometimes because a designer bird house is prettier to look at. Several…

Don’t we all have loads of stuff we don’t use most of the time? Why not share it with others and make a little money? Over the last years we’ve seen the launch of lots of initiatives that aim to stimulate people to rent out their temporarily unused assets to others in return for a…

Psychogeography is hot. Guy Debord, founding member of Situationist International and the man who coined the term in 1955, defined the phenomenon as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals”. In fact, psychogeography is the art of strolling, or just about…

The city seems to be too boring in the eyes of many and that’s why new playful urban interventions will overload the urban landscape in the coming time. New generations of grown-ups want to experience the city as a playground and designers slowly get to understand this. Whereas street artists and non-commissioned urban interventionists started to experiment with these kinds of interventions over the past years, now also governments and brands aim to be playful in public space by creating and injecting urban play elements.

First of all we wish you all a happy, inspiring and healthy 2012! In January last year we published a series of ten trends for 2011 when it comes to urbanism, design, marketing and technology. It became a pretty successful bunch of articles. Our number 1, Marketing Is Urbanism, even got tweeted by the one and only Richard…

An interesting development in the world of architecture and design are new types of experimental offices. Traditional firms are slowly being replaced by new architecture start-ups and old fashion 20th century thinking is replaced by a fresh 21st century approach. The new office is no office!